10 Commandments for UI Design

Design principles that are frequently missed.

The year is approximately 1,300 BC when Moses received the 10 UI design commandments from the almighty design gods. The list was comprised of best practices that only the most enlightened designers would be aware of.

This list was adapted from Will Grant’s 101 UX Principles. These are my favorite ten of the 101 principles from the book.

1. Empty States

Thou shalt make blank states more than just an empty display

A display that would typically be populated with user input is blank because the user has opened your product for the first time.

This could be a list of books, projects, to-dos, customers, or songs — but since they haven’t added anything yet, it’s empty.

Leaving a blank slate where the content would be is a missed opportunity for you to provide guidance and information about what your software can do.

You should use your empty state to orient users.

You can use empty states as an opportunity to provide advice, guidance, an overview of possible actions, or simply replace the empty state with a screen allowing users to input the missing information.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you don’t just say, “There’s nothing here yet…”

2. Sliders

Thou shalt not use sliders for quantifiable values

Ever get frustrated at a slider because you want to set it to 6, but it keeps landing on either 5 or 7? This isn’t your fault — it’s the designer’s.

Sliders are great for qualitative values like brightness, volume, color pickers, and so on.

You should never use sliders for selecting specific numerical values — in these cases…